Go Teams Baumer's local baseball compendium is good history, tough read BY SAM PFEIFLE
	WHEN TOWNS HAD TEAMS By Jim Baumer | River Vision Press | 287 pages | $17.95 | Baumer reads at Longfellow Books, in Portland | Wednesday, Oct 5 | 207.772.4045

It’s all about the Red Sox now. Even as UMaine challenged for the College World Series title this summer, it was hard to distract even hardcore baseball fans with the college doings. With the Sox on TV every night for cable subscribers, and blanketing sports talk radio local and national, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the Major League news to the distraction of nearly everything else. Even the Sea Dogs, competing for a minor league championship, were hardly the talk of the town as they battled Akron.

So, unless you’ve got a kid in high school, or have some serious free time on your hands, it’s unlikely you’re following amateur baseball. And if you’re younger than, say, 35, you’d probably find it hard to believe that semi-pro baseball drew thousands of fans to local ballparks in Lewiston/Auburn, Bangor, Portland — heck, all over the state — as recently as the 1960s. Seriously, can you imagine 2000 fans coming out to watch Farmington take on Auburn? Not Mount Blue vs. Edward Little for a state title, mind you, but the Farmington Flyers vs. the Auburn Asas, or, better yet, the West Minot Townies vs. the Dixfield Dixies. There were no Sluggers, or Trash Monsters, or fireworks — often, no stands — but people came out in droves to support their local teams.

It was, as Jim Baumer writes in his brand-new When Towns Had Teams, "A time when towns were alive with the crack of the ball hitting the bat, the smack of leather and the sounds of ball fields resonating with the intricate beauty of baseball played by a special group of men." That’s one perspective on it, anyway. You kind of have to grant Baumer his premise — that the time before WCSH went and ruined everything by televising the first Sox game in Maine on May 18, 1954, was special and, in a way sacred — to really enjoy the book. Why not a book on the history of competitive bowling leagues, or stock-car racing? Because, for some of us, there is a pristine goodness to baseball, its order, open-endedness, and statistics, that elevates it beyond a sport to a pastime. Baumer’s got that bug bad.

There’s no mystery as to where it originates. His uncle Bob was a wily left-handed hurler for the Roberts 88’ers, in Baumer’s hometown of Lisbon. Though he’s writing of another player, George Ferguson, once you come upon these words, they ring from page one to the last: "When boys grow up with fathers that are renowned for their athletic prowess, there is an expectation that they will follow in their footsteps." Though Baumer largely removes his childhood from this book until he springs it on us in Chapter Nine, it’s clear from the outset that he grew up idolizing his uncle and the other ballplayers, and that passion never left him. Jim now coaches a team in Portland’s Twilight League, one of the longest-running baseball leagues in the country, and we’re provided with a picture of his own son taking swings out at the Oaks (Deering’s baseball field down by 295).

This unadulterated thrill for the game largely saves Baumer’s book. Would even baseball fans be otherwise interested in who was the MVP of the all-star game that pitted the Andy County League stars vs. the Spruce Tree League stars? (It was Dave Begos, who notched a dinger and a double.) There’s some serious minutiae here, even if it’s mitigated by fairly interesting interviews with former players like Lisbon’s Stan Doughty, Yarmouth’s Pat Feury, or Norway’s Stubby Truman.

It must be said, too, that this book needed an editor. Publishing his first full-length, on his own imprint, River Vision Press, Baumer could have used some help. That quote about fathers? It really should have been "fathers who" instead of "fathers that." One player is a "Yankee’s farmhand." Compliment and complement are used fairly interchangeably. There are a lot of clunky sentences like, "Baseball in many of the communities of Maine was still firmly planted, but it had been uprooted in other places, however." On page 37, Baumer notes that Dixfield rejoined the Pine Tree League in 1960; on page 38, he writes that "after the 1956 season, the town team Dixies rejoined the Pine Tree League and became a fixture over the next decade, save for two years in 1960 and 1961, when they rejoined the Timber League during its brief revival." Quotation marks are dropped all over the place, making it difficult to read some of the reminiscences.

Though these are minor things, they accumulate, and detract from what must have been exhaustive research on Baumer’s part. His many hours toiling in libraries over microfiche and tracking down former ballplayers to interview are somewhat blunted by an imperfect presentation. A very specific audience will agree with Baumer that the probable death of town-team baseball with Bangor’s Bay League and Portland’s Twilight League is a travesty in the making and be enthralled by his book. A casual reader will be less impressed.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com